Becoming a legal entity and accepting donations (was: Re: Buildbot Performance)

[Ruben Di Battista]

Just as a side note, here in France I just created a non-profit association
for a project I'm working on related to the organization of an event, and
the process is almost free and reasonably fast. In a matter of few weeks we
had the association published on the official governmental gazette and a
bank account, also free of keeping charges.

Same thing in Italy.

I perfectly agree with the will of having the legal entity in US, but I
think the process in Europe might be less expensive at least, probably
faster.


On Mon, 17 May 2021, 08:02 Ryan Schmidt, <ryandesign at macports.org> wrote:

> On May 16, 2021, at 14:46, Mark Anderson wrote:
>
> > I keep wondering if we became like a not-for-profit If we could get
> someone like MacStadium or Amazon or something to donate server time to us.
> Or accept donations from Github sponsorship. I could look into what that
> would take, although it might be way more trouble than it's worth. I think
> my current corp lawyer knows non-profit law - I could bring it up next time
> I see them.
>
> MacStadium already donates the use of an Apple Silicon Mac mini to us. I
> am not aware of whether Amazon offers free persistent Mac servers with root
> access to open source projects.
>
> Accepting donations through GitHub Sponsors or any other means would, I
> suspect, require the formation of a legal entity for MacPorts, which would
> be the owner of the business bank account we would probably have to open.
> We've discussed becoming a legal entity a few times over the years but it
> hasn't been done. If we do it, my preference would be for MacPorts to be a
> U.S. entity, since I am in the U.S. and since MacPorts was started by Apple
> and is for the benefit of Apple users and Apple is a U.S. company. A
> different suggestion was that we should join an existing free software
> organization and leave all the legalities up to them, and funnel donations
> through them. I don't think that idea was supported by everyone so that
> didn't happen either.
>
> If we accepted donations, we would have to develop guidelines for how the
> donations could be spent.
>
> Being recognized as a not-for-profit is a whole 'nother can of worms.
> First one has to form a legal entity, then one has to apply to be
> recognized as a not-for-profit (which incurs additional fees) and make a
> case for why that should be, a process which can take years, and the answer
> to the application could be no. For example there was increased scrutiny of
> non-profit organization applications in the field of open source software
> in 2010; see https://opensource.org/node/840. That's what I recall from
> researching the process in the U.S. It may differ in other countries.
>
>
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